Abstract
Since its development for wireless local area networks, the IEEE 802.11 standard has been widely used for various wireless networks due to its low cost and effectiveness in reducing collisions with simple and decentralized mechanisms. There are numerous analytical studies that have evaluated the performance of the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) media access control (MAC) protocol in infrastructure and ad hoc networks. Most of these studies are confined to saturated traffic analysis, infrastructure networks or single hop ad hoc networks. In addition, most of them adopt simplified assumptions to reduce the complexity of the proposed models, which deviate from the IEEE 802.11 standards. In this paper, we present a novel analytical stochastic reward net model for performance evaluation of the IEEE 802.11 DCF MAC protocol in multi-hop ad hoc networks in the presence of hidden nodes, taking into account the characteristics of the physical layer, different traffic loads, packet size and carrier sense range. The proposed model captures most features of the protocol. Performance measures such as goodput and packet service time for various network configurations are computed. The proposed model is validated through extensive simulations.